‘The patient is always wrong,’ is that what’s taught at medical school?

I was talking recently about the current climate of denial still occurring in mental health and how, in the past, when I have suffered detrimental effects of psychiatric drugs, I have been still forced to take them.

                A psychiatric nurse at the talk wanted to dismiss the brain damage, caused by neuroleptics, and concurrent memory loss as ‘aging.’  I’m only forty! Besides, I felt the harm being caused to me. I felt the ongoing pain while taking the drugs. And I felt the very gradual recovery from those horrific damaging effects the neuroleptics caused, as well as what hasn’t recovered. Besides, it is well-known the drugs do this. It is even on the drug’s website.

                Then a psychiatrist issued a poor excuse rather than a question. Instead of apologising for the harm caused by his colleagues, he leapt to their defence and accused, ‘Patients don’t really know what’s going on, so it’s hard to tell if their complaints are valid.’

                In front of me he wanted to excuse the way he, most obviously, systematically invalidated his patient’s complaints about medications, made invalid the truth and left them wondering what truth is exactly. So many psychiatrists I’ve been forced to be patient to, agree with, submit to… it’s horrible this is crazy-making denial.

                I offered a concrete example of when I saw a GP for a broken finger, which I knew was broken, because I’d heard it snap, plus I’d had broken bones before, so I recognised the kind of pain associated with a break, just as I recognise the effects of neuroleptics after being force intermittently over a 14 year period to take them.

                The GP told me, ‘It’s only a sprain.’

                I was eighteen and I believed him. It took me another month before a work colleague insisted I go to hospital to get it x-rayed. And that proved it was broken, but it had started to mend so there was no way to set the bones in their right place. As a result I have a permanently gammy finger.

                It’s one thing to come to a doctor with something wrong and be denied the appropriate treatment you wish to have, it’s quite another thing to be dragged to a doctor and be physically harmed by forced treatment that causes your bones to become brittle. (Yes, osteoporosis is an effect of neuroleptics listed on drug websites. They stop a women’s menstrual cycle.)

                Refusal to take, ‘required medication’ should be understood better.

First of all, why is medication, ‘required’ when counselling, psychology or art therapy has not been tried? Why is it required when the patient is in no way violent? Why is it required when the patient knows from previous doses that they have suffered horribly on it?

When smoking was allowed in pubs around Australia, I developed an immune related allergy to second-hand tobacco smoke. People would deny and deny the validity of this. They would try to say I was imagining that my face swelled up and my eyes itched so like I wanted to remove them. I was lucky that a doctor, a GP, affirmed that this was a common reaction to tobacco smoke.

People don’t want to see themselves as a perpetrator of harmful actions, even if they are, because they then see themselves as a victim of accusation and so they quickly attempt to rescue themselves and end up accusing the victim of being the perpetrator.

It is extremely hard to get a doctor to affirm the harm caused by neuroleptics because they don’t want to end up transferred and thus be victimised. Humane psychiatrist Peter Breggin explains it does not make him popular amongst his colleagues, when he tells the truth about the harm psychiatrists cause on a regular basis to their patients. He is then accused of causing harm to his profession.

This  denial of what is clearly happening could be easily confirmed by looking at the offending drug’s website and finding that yes, what the patient is describing is a known effect of the medication that’s been prescribed for ‘treatment.’

Psychiatrists have not been sued in Australia for LSD tests in the 70s (patients were often given over a hundred tabs.) Psychiatrists have not been sued in Australia, for forcing drugs that cause diabetes, for causing Tardive Dyskinesia in so many of their patients. They have not been sued for causing osteoporosis, or epilepsy, memory-loss, for traumatising, for prescribing drugs that cause a person to feel so unwell they suicide, for causing chronic fatigue and nausea so a person is unable to work. For giving drugs that cause a person’s sight to blur so they can no longer study, then dismissing this effect of the drug as ‘psychosomatic,’ when it is listed on the drug’s website. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have not been sued for giving advice that is harmful, the number one offender being, ‘take your medication.’ Psychiatric drugs are harmful, so that is really dangerous advice to give anyone, particularly if you are a mental health professional.

Causing harm to others, is not okay. When a doctor causes harm, that doctor is not practising medicine, they are conducting experiments. When a patient says they don’t want to take harmful drugs because of the side-effects are too horrible and the doctor forces those drugs on the patient, this is torture. Psychiatric drugs are extremely painful physically and mentally, causing anguish over a long period, for 24 hours of the day, every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year, for how many years a psychiatrist keeps a patient on a treatment order.

Psychiatric drugs also cause permanent damage, which is often visible to others, particularly when the nervous system gets damaged, or memory becomes impaired.

Psychiatric drugs are extremely unsafe, harmful measures and to force such things on 20 per cent of our population is one of the ugliest regimes that has continued into the millennium. It is the total opposite of the terms it uses to advertise and advise. Psychiatry is not about ‘care’ and ‘health’ it is about abuse and control.

When I worked as a shop assistant from a young age, I was told a golden rule: ‘The customer is always right.’

Patients are customers. People become unwilling customers of psychiatry once they’ve experienced it, however, they still are, in a perverted way, customers. The psychiatrist is receiving money for the patients seen.

I think all doctors need to be retrained to realise, ‘The patient is always right.’

That’s probably a hard one to swallow for a psychiatrist who is used to dictating. It’s like saying, ‘Take a dose of your own medicine.’ Which psychiatrists won’t do.

If a Court Judge were to dismiss every case as invalid because the thinking was, ‘The witnesses don’t really understand legal matters, so it’s hard to tell if their complaints are valid,’ that would be really wrong. However, since there are lawyers representing each side of the cases in court the judges have interpreters.

Do patients, who have committed no crime, need to bring along medical interpreters to see their psychiatrists, so they are not condemned? Would that enable a person some respect?

Well, maybe, but those interpreters must not be desensitised by their training. They must be people schooled in medicine who still hold close the ethics to not cause harm. They must also be people who do not dehumanise and are not easily bribed.

If I was to propose changes, it would be that all doctors have to undergo new ethics training, to understand where their previous training and intern mentoring was horrifically wrong.

If they won’t, or are training-resistant and keep committing harm, then they have to retire from their profession.

Something like that would make sense and hopefully address and resolve the notion, that, ‘The patient is always wrong,’ which doctors seem to hold as an axiom.

Don’t pooh-pooh psychiatric abuse and condemn like Freud eventually did with his patients who talked about how his colleagues and esteemed friends had raped them when they were children. Don’t do that same thing the church and schools have done to cover up child abuse, which the population condemns. Protecting, ‘your own’ when they’ve caused harm, is denial of justice. That is not okay. It is not right. It is really, really, wrong to cover up and deny abuse.

The dehumanisation of those with a psychiatric diagnose and the following societal ignorance, blame and acceptance of the torture caused by psychiatric practises, is truly one of the most stupid and horrific government approved regimes. It is stupid because the internet enables the information about the effects of these drugs to be freely available. The internet also allows brave individuals with a conscience, knowledge or experience to speak up. For those with experience, like me, to speak I need support and at the moment I have that. Having someone who loves me enough to fight tooth and nail to make certain psychiatry will never harm me again, is a wonderful relief to my psyche. I can remain calm and say what needs to be said without freaking out that if I say something too edgy the bastards will come and get me and I’ll be the living-dead again, unable to think, work or play.

Forced-drugging and ECT needs to be stopped immediately (though for safety from withdrawal effects, all medications needs to be tapered slowly.) Peer-support groups can be set up to combat those suffering from the abuses of psychiatry. People may also wish to have trauma therapy related to their psychiatric abuse. At the moment, with such a widespread denial of psychiatric abuse, I would only go to a therapist who understood, or had lived-experience of psychiatric abuse. I wouldn’t want to be in therapy all vulnerable and opening up and have some shmuck who denied the validity of my experience and blamed me, like so many ignorant prejudiced people do.

People really need to get their facts straight and stop their stupidity. Backing up psychiatric practices that cause harm, is aiding and abetting. So stop it. You will be held accountable for your actions.

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